My Special Girl, who is an 11-year-old Thoroughbred used for teaching veterinary students, licked her offspring clean while the pair recuperated together.

The mare was a surrogate, impregnated through an advanced reproductive technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI. The procedure involves injecting a single sperm into a mature egg. After fertilization, specialists transferred the embryo to My Special Girl in April 2013

A Thoroughbred-Cleveland Bay cross mare provided the egg and a long-deceased Thoroughbred-Quarter Horse cross stallion provided the sperm, which came from frozen semen.

Her pregnancy represents the first time ICSI has been completed successfully in the Delaware Valley, a procedure the doctors hope the school will replicate.